Episode 30: Barron Peper and Jescelle Major

Designers who have watched the homelessness crisis expand during their educational careers seem to have a heightened sense of the design community’s opportunity to creatively engage the issue of homelessness. During this episode, I speak with two young designers: Barron Peper and Jescelle Major, who are trained as an architect and a landscape architect respectively. While working together at the mutli-disciplinary design firm MITHUN, they helped the Low Income Housing Institute or LEEHIGH develop a tiny house village in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood.

Barron’s story is particularly interesting for long-time listeners to the podcast because his first engagement with homelessness was with the Community First! Village in Austin, Texas that I discussed with Alan Graham in Episode 25, and he now works with Rex Holbein and Jenn LaFrenierre at The Block Project, which we discussed in Episode 3.

On the homelandlab.com website, we’ve included a selection of site plans and images from the project Barron and Jescelle discuss.

To start the conversation today I asked Jescelle and Barron: What is a tiny house village?